webslides from diigo - slideshows of bookmarked pages September 7th, 2007 · No Comments Webslides is a useful add-on feature from what I already consider to be the premier social bookmarking device on the web - diigo. This feaure allows you to create a slide show from your bookmarks so they become more interesting and you can highlight what you want. This lets you convey a series of points quickly and gives rise to an overall effect. Kind of like the difference between a picture and a group of pictures that run together to make a short movie. Each frame is meaningful, but in the aggregate they gain much, much more meaning and impact. Okay, enough about that. Just try it and see if you agree.

By the way, if you’re not familiar with diigo, it’s a collaborative bookmarking tool available for free on the web. It fits in and becomes part of your browser so you can capture information of any kind (words, audio, video, URLs, etc.) while browsing, doing research, etc. So far I’ve just described bookmarking, which we’ve all been doing that since Internet Explorer and Netscape were duking it out in 1995. So what’s the difference? The twist is diigo (like many competing services such as del.icio.us, furl, spurl, Yahoo!, Windows Live, and others) makes your bookmarks available to all other users of the service, while doing the same for you. Instant sharing. Of course you can also restrict your bookmarks to a particular group or keep them to yourself. But where’s the fun in that?

I maintain a few groups on diigo myself on topics such as legal technology, real property law, the current mortgage meltdown, divorce, immigration … you get the idea. You can check out my diigo groups and join them yourself (yes, I’m encouraging you to do so) by going to http://groups.diigo.com/. As always, thank you for your support.

WebSlides - Transforms Bookmarks Once Again  Annotated New feature from Diigo (currently in private beta testing): create a slideshow of links with highlighting and sticky notes. You can record audio or add music to accompany it. I could see this having potential for basic tutorials or demos; you could do this instead of using screencast or recording software.

We received a nice exclusive from Diigo the social bookmarking beta about their latest release WebSlides. This innovation is a browser based player that displays live Web pages with integrated annotation, sticky notes and highlights in an interactive slideshow. With this cool tool users can record and narrate tracks as well as add background music to make compelling shows - and somewhat more. WebSlides is being presented at the Office 2.0 Conference as I write this, so we wanted you to have a look at this simple, innovative and useful tool as well......

Webslides from Diigo I got an email from Diigo to check out their newest coolest web 2.0 innovation. They call it webslides and it is basically an animation that presents your favorite bookmarks. Just select a bunch of bookmarks, add some voice or sound if you want to, and that's it. Now people can see the things you like.When I was visiting the webslides site, I got a 'knowledge accident' and stumbled upon one on e-learning bookmarks "Transforming education through technology"

Diigo Debuts WebSlides - The Ten-Minute Preso Fix Normally, I wouldn’t pop a vendor’s release in the Exclamation blog, but I really think that Diigo has come up with a pretty novel idea. Slideshows, when they’re good, tell a story. And that’s exactly what Exclamation is about - telling kick-ass stories. This morning, Diigo officially released WebSlides. They’re probably hanging out at Office 2.0 right now, basking in the glory of their slideyness. This release puts social tagging and bookmarking a little bit closer to the average joe, as it lets them enjoy the benefits of the medium without having to learn the guts of how it works. Here’s a good example of how WebSlides looks: a slideshow on genealogy 2.0. We’ve been using Diigo here at LaunchSquad for about five months, and while we normally use it to forward cool sites around the office (and share with clients), there are some pretty solid applications for marketing, PR, social media and communications here too. WebSlides allows the user to make a slideshow of anything they tagged in Diigo. So, for example, if you have about 10 minutes and a decent wireless connection, you can prepare a narrated clip portfolio to show some of your company’s work (e.g. great articles written about your company or your clients). As long as these sites are already bookmarked in Diigo, you can pop them into the drag-and-drop interface and create the show very quickly; a web-slides feature has always been an Achilles heel of PowerPoint. (Well, geez, one of many - who am I kidding, here?) WebSlides differs from, say, Slideshare, because (1) it’s not just for uploading pre-existing Pages or PowerPoint presentations into a slideshow. It’s meant for making web-clipping slideshows, quickly. Not to diss Slideshare too much; they’re good for what they are - a post-presentation YouTube - but you really can’t make anything that looks too polished due to their bric-a-brac UI. For the time being, I’d go easy on using sound and narration gratuitously on WebSlides, as it doesn’t seem to have quite caught up with the rest of the product, but Diigo is usually good about fixing all bugs in a few weeks. WebSlides is a practical innovation from a company that’s been percolating with good ideas for some time now.

I received an email recently about a new service from Diigo called WebSlides which lets you, as they say, "convert your bookmarks into slideshows." However, I think their marketing plan to sell WebSlides as just another bookmarking tool is doing it a disservice. I initially could not imagine why I would want my bookmarks saved as slideshows, but I immediately saw the value of the app as a training tool. I could picture WebSlide users making a walkthrough of how to use a particular website, presenting the features of a new web service, or making a WebSlide show to be used in a classroom setting. WebSlides' value is not just in the way it lets you stitch together a series of web pages together to form a slideshow; it is the ability to add sticky notes, highlights, and integrated annotations to the slideshows that make the service so useful. In addtion, you can record and narrate tracks to go along with the slideshow or add music. Some other suggestions for the use of WebSlides, as noted on their site, include: Show a list of houses to real estate clients Review a list of job candidates found online Bundle important course resources for students Assemble all the pages on a specific family line Provide guided use cases for potential customers Share the favorite places you would like to visit with your friends and blog readers Provide a quick briefing, a simple tutorial or guided tour on any subject.

Since most of my presentations are largely guided tours of pertinent Web services, this baby will save me a ton of time. Combine site syndication and social bookmarking with presentations and you get WebSlides, a service from social bookmarking service Diigo that turns RSS feeds and bookmark lists into annotated browser slideshows.

Diigo To Launch Webslides for RSS Feeds and Bookmarks at TechCrunch40 Research toolbox, diigo is going to introduce Webslides for RSS Feeds and Bookmarks at TechCrunch40 next week in San Francisco. The new Webslides widget is an embeddable player that presents feeds or bookmarks as live web pages in an interactive slideshow format – complete with the full content, pages, links, comments, and ads. It can be sent to friends and colleagues and also placed on websites, blogs and in social networks. Each slide that is displayed actually registers as a page view for the content owner. Webslides also adds a new layer to the web by allowing any Diigo user to annotate each page on the fly with sticky notes to share thoughts or to highlight important sections. Viewers can also bookmark, tag, share, and clip content from the pages in WebSlides for future reference in their own Diigo online folders. To create WebSlides, users simply enter a feed or list of bookmarks and add background music or voice narration. By clicking “Play,” the list transforms into a slideshow, bringing Web pages and user comments to life. For more on the subject, see TechCrunch.

WebSlides - Turning bookmarks and feeds into interactive slideshows… — A new Diigo service– with del.icio.us posting and some interesting annotation possibilities I keep thinking I should switch to Diigo as main posting point for sharing links

With the use of a tool such as webslides, students could then view the web site with the article or link to the primary source of the research. The students could view the websites with annotations by the teachers to support the students’ current level of understanding of the material or add additional information or questions to enhance the instruction. Students could then work in their groups to discuss their findings to their peers. This would allow students to come to their own conclusions from the information that they are presented. The assessment could be the presentation of their findings and conclusions via a posting to the class website or some other tool that would allow them to present what new ideas they synthesized and not a high tech presentation with little to no substance. Students would work in the same manner that other scientists around the world are by looking at the new data from research. The article was posted on the 20th of this month, two days ago, and students could be researching about the discovery tomorrow the 23rd. This changing of ideas also illustrates to students the way in which scientific knowledge changes and gets refined in light of new information from researchers. So could this lesson be taught without computer technology? Absolutely but technology allows the instruction to be much more fluid and connected. The teacher could run off all the articles, write on them and make copies for the class, but the exchange of information would likely not be as fluid.

first in the demo area at TC40 and now a full demo at DEMO. I had the chance to meet Maggie Tsai from Diigo and she took me through some of their new features. The initial product was a Web annotation tool which in itself is very cool. Maggie then showed me another piece of their technology called WebSlides. Now this is cool and useful. I could see Web (and other) agencies loving this along with bloggers! Basically its a PowerPoint for the Web. You annotate the Web pages for your presentation, and then WebSlides takes each page live and creates a fully-functional presentation. No more screenshots in a ppt, instead you save each page as a slide and then you can move just as you would in a ppt. Maggie called this an "innovative way to repackage content and the publisher gets all the traffic." The new "layer" they are presenting at DEMO is a social layer. Diigo will now find neighbors who might be close to the things you are. You can search by tag and find other users who also are interested in that tag. The messaging system between neighbors was twitter-like. From their official press release, "Diigo offers a variety of productive ways for people with common interests to easily find one another and aggregate into specific groups or communities. "Interest Neighbors" help people identify other users who share similar interests; "Site Communities" unite users who annotate the same website; "Advanced People Search" identifies users based on reading interests and their profile information; and "Friends" creates a connection between people." "Diigo combines the best of social networking, bookmarking, highlighting, and annotating to let people discover, save, and share the information that is important to them personally or professionally," said Wade Ren, CEO of Diigo. "Not only can people find a collective repository of searchable and relevant information, but they can markup and save information along the way - all while connecting with like-minded people for future collaboration." The Diigo HQ is located in Reno, Nevada and their development team is in China. Maggie was quick to note that it's not an offshore relationship, the developers are all Diigo employees. The leadership team are all former investment managers. I like the annotation and social layer tools, but the WebSlides tool is the strongest of the set and could be an invesment opportunity for a company such as Zoho.

Josh: Diigo is a web-based tool for what the company is calling "social annotation." It lets users highlight, annotate (via sticky notes), and clip information from any web site. What I think makes Diigo potentially very useful is that you can share your annotations, clippings and bookmarks with a group. For students and professors I think Diigo could help groups organize their thoughts and research for team projects. Marshall reviewed them a year ago for TechCrunch.

Marshall: I like Diigo a lot, but I haven't kept using them in the time since I first reviewed them. The new Webslides feature looks like it could come in handy and the groups looks solid

I don't know how many more features this product needs. There are already so many! I think they need to focus on finding distribution channels for what they've already built.

Diigo, which bills itself as a “social annotation” tool (previous coverage here), will present its platform at DEMOfall. Rather than just compiling interesting data found online, the platform allows you to organize by bookmarking, highlighting, and clipping only the most relevant elements of sites, including videos, and then adding sticky notes with annotations. These can then in turn be used to create a slideshows (Diigo’s WebSlides), that according to Diigo can be used by groups in collaborative efforts or presentations. In fact, it’s this community/collaborative element that Diigo hopes will help their service stand out from an already crowded space. In theory users will be driven to congregate around topics, feeding these with their own ideas and reflections through personal clippings and annotations, all the while discovering other collaborators on the same topics.

Diigo @ DEMOfall 07 - A True 3D Information App?

Diigo.com announced their re-launch today with an information network unlike any we have seen in  scope or capability. The new Diigo network being unveiled at DEMOfall 07 creates global communities around data, information, interests and knowledge. These new communities engage and connect people around the content they collect and use. Diigo is already one of the most useful bookmarking and research sites on the Web. The integration of Webslides and the power of "writing the Web" makes Diigo perhaps the Web's first truly 3 dimensional tool. I spoke with Diigo Co-Founder Maggie Tsai on Friday about their deep and groundbreaking vison. I covered Webslides a couple of weeks ago, but honestly did not envision the depth or scope of Diigo's potential. Maggie demonstrated the capability of a development nearly as complex and difficult to encapsulate as the semantic search engine's technology. The simple truth of Diigo combined with Webslides is that with continued refinements Diigo could well be the mega site imagined by many for Web 3.0. Diigo Plus Webslides Diigo users can create groups, lists, collaborative forums, do research, annotate or comment on pages and essentially build layers of data and knowledge atop any Web page. The concept of a multi-layered Web is difficult to grasp, but Maggie's team have begun to capture the power of what content-centric (their word my understanding) collaboration can do. "Writing" to the Web via sticky notes, annotations and highlighted elements combined with various collaborative elements is power for more than doing a research project. With the addition of Webslides - essentially an interactive, selective browser/player within a browser - Diigo provides a multifaceted platform for unbelievable collaboration and monetization potential. Diigo also unveiled another crucial element for "directing" data at users with their Webslides embeddable widget. This tool allows users to embed Webslides bookmark or RSS shows inside pages and blogs. These shows can be customized to express any number of topical or thematic blog posts, topical articles, product reviews, real estate offerings or just about anything one can imagine.

A Tall Order Diigo is certainly a fantastic individual or collaborative research tool, but inserting a platform like this into what we might call "the hub" (the center of what people do) of the Web has deeper implications. Bookmarking and social networking has seen massive appeal. The idea of wrapping users up in this core of data and knowledge has been touched upon by sites like Wikia, Digg, Stumble Upon, Facebook and many others in the various venues. All of these great sites gather content that is acted on and sometimes enhanced by users, but the data remains rather static or 2 dimensional for the user. Stumbled Upon comes closest to letting users "filter" the Web and its data but even there the great volume of information is lost or scattered with time. Diigo's methodology effectively turns Diigo into a Web within a Web of filtered, searchable and dynamic information.

An Easy Way To Present A Collection Of Sites

That is absolutely one of the most useful and amazing things I have seen in a long time! Wow! I am totally Stumbling this page! Garry

There are a few posts I’ve written here where I’ve mentioned the phenomenal bookmarking service call Diigo. It’s something I use all the time.

The folks at Diigo have pushed the envelope a little farther with something they’ve recently announced call WebSlides. The reasons for using such a service are numerous, but the one I see being used the most is for bloggers to highlight other sites. Another use is to create a presentation about your own blog for visitors to get to know about your place. It might be a nice addition to your sidebar or About page. A presentation is very simple to make. While in your Diigo account, you select the sites you want to include and save them to a list. You can then add an audio file for background music or narration if you like. Readers can adjust the speed at which they move from site to site. They can pause it or even click on the sites provided in a list at their own pace — all without having to create a Diigo account of their own. I’ve explained more in my own presentation, so click the button below and take it for a spin. (Btw, yes, that’s me narrating. )

I’m glad you took the time to drop a comment here. I really appreciate all that you guys do, and please know that you have a strong supporter of your service as I’ve talked about it a few times here and on my other blogs. Keep it up!

My favorite feature? When you highlight a word on any page a drop down menu automatically appears (see image below) that lets you: search for the highlighted words on the web with any of four search engines search for highlighted terms in four social bookmarking systems do a blog search for highlighted terms search for your terms in the entire site you are on (Google, Yahoo, Ask site: search) search for inbound links to the URL you are on in four different search engines (including Technorati and Google) search for your highlighted terms in seven different verticals from local to TV to stocks.

I came across this site recently and I can definitely say it has made my browsing experience much more simplified and pleasurable.Diigo is a social annotation site that lets you post sticky notes on a webpage so next time you visit the site you remember something that you would otherwise forget. Just like that post-it-note that you stuck on your computer to remind you of something. Think, you visited Work N Play and added it to your favorites and you didn’t visit the site for a month ( that is rude ) and when you eventually did you forgot something that you wanted to say or write or read on the site. This is where diigo comes in handy.When you find a site and like it or have something you want to do later you can create a sticky post to remind you later, this sticky post stays on that site and you will be able to view it only when you browse the net by signing in to your diigo account. Also you can highlight texts on any site and add a note or remark as well.

Diigo also offers a toolbar which makes this process even simpler. You can sign in from the toolbar and start browsing the internet as you usually do. Whenever you come across a site that you stuck a note onto, it will be displayed. To make it even easier once you post a note or highlight a text on a site, you don’t have to try to remember it as everytime you post a note or highlight a sites text it will be saved under My Bookmarks in the toolbar. So next time just click on My Bookmarks and you can get the list of all the sites that you used a sticky post to. You can import your favorites from your favorites folder as well. I have been using this service for about a week and a half and I am loving it. It has given my aging mind some rest as I don’t have to try to remember some things because Diigo takes care of it for me.